originally posted by: WhenDovesCry
Wouldn't this simply be called poverty?

That's what this revolves around, poverty and what is usually a by-product of it ---Violence [drugs]

The kids that have to endure violence day in and day out, watch other kids being beaten/ killed, some innocent some not

Not knowing if they are going to get mugged on the way to school/ home
Not knowing if they are going to get shot/stabbed
Not knowing if they'll ever make it out of the neighborhood and go on with a semi-normal life

The stress and pressure just to survive the battle zone every day while trying to get an education, in the hopes of getting away from there

Many kids suffer because of all the stress, which in turn affects their learning abilities
Many give up school all together
And many will never be able to leave there which creates a never ending cycle over & over

The point to the article was how kids suffer from PTSD due to this kind of life [poverty=stress] and studies suggests it affects their ability to
learn

I can attest to this PERSONALLY. I grew up in a ghetto, and surrounded by vice, sin, and sung to sleep at night by the whispers of drive-by bullets.
Anyone who thinks that this isn't real, needs to do some serious time in a REAL ghetto... I doubt the nay-sayers would last a month, much less a
year. A friend of mine got a print-out from his VA therapist, it was a check-list of symptoms for PTSD. Supposedly, if you had 3 or more of the listed
symptoms, you were PTSD. I had EIGHT. Ghetto-induced PTSD is not an excuse, it's a lifestyle when you live there.

a reply to: snarky412
Kids don't ask to be born wherever, at least not as far as I know. Maybe we all do choose ahead of time, doesn't seem probable to me. Kids are not
really rational either, I remember believing for most of my childhood that my dad hated me.

He would never come to my tournaments or games, was always gone until I was asleep, so he must obviously hate me. That was a belief I grew up having,
even though it was a bunch of BS. He was never around because he was busting his ass all day, every day, trying to keep my family fed, clothed and
sheltered.

I worked in a middleschool for quite awhile, and my job was to work in the blc (behavioral learning center). Basically, it was a class full of the
kids that have been labelled, I.e. autistic, adhd, behavior problems, learning disabilities....basically any kid that other teachers didnt want to
deal with.

Outside of the autistic kids, almost all of them had abuse in their past. In my opinion, nearly every one was suffering ptsd.

Its a fine line though. After working with that many kids that were "labelled", and seeing what those labels did to their self esteem and the way
they were treated because of them, im not sure another label is really the answer.

when people come home from serving in a war zone, they are often diagnosed with ptsd or some other stress disorder. so this is not an attempt to
label, it's just looking at the reality of poverty. poverty sucks, no one should have to live in poverty.

originally posted by: kaylaluv
It just seems like it would be so much easier and less violent to offer a cash incentive to those who would volunteer to get vasectomies and tubes
tied. I'd love it if my taxes helped pay each person in a poverty-stricken community a $1,000 to get a reversible sterilization procedure.

Because if I want to amass enough money to give me the ability to change my life I should have to give up any right to having a family in the future
right?

I've never heard of tubal litigation - is that some kind of reproductive legal procedure? I guess you mean tubal ligation.

Don't get hung up on my suggestion of the procedure. I don't care what actual procedure is used - as long as it's reversible. It could be insertion
of an IUD, or birth control pellets that are inserted just under the skin (my cousin's wife did this because she kept forgetting to take the pill and
had 2 unplanned pregnancies, and it worked out great for her). Something that doesn't require daily use by the individual, because those things can
be forgotten, so they are unreliable.

Not having children to be raised in these horrible, violent, stressful conditions is a wise choice, but sometimes people don't make wise decisions.
Giving them some kind of incentive (like cash) to consciously make those types of decisions just seems like a good idea to me. Most of these children
weren't even really wanted to begin with, so reproductive control is the best strategy. You can't just tell them not to have sex (not realistic),
and you can't always depend on them to use condoms or take a pill every day.

originally posted by: snarky412
What a sad life these kids have got, with little to no future for some of them
Seems like more could be done to make their neighborhoods safer

End the war on drugs. I guarantee that gang culture will evaporate overnight once it stops being so easy to make money illegally.

But don't you think they'll just find some other way of making money illegally? Like sex trafficking, or illegal gambling, or some other type of
"mafia" behavior? Where there are not enough opportunities to make money legitimately, they will find some other way of making money.

originally posted by: snarky412
What a sad life these kids have got, with little to no future for some of them
Seems like more could be done to make their neighborhoods safer

End the war on drugs. I guarantee that gang culture will evaporate overnight once it stops being so easy to make money illegally.

But don't you think they'll just find some other way of making money illegally? Like sex trafficking, or illegal gambling, or some other type of
"mafia" behavior? Where there are not enough opportunities to make money legitimately, they will find some other way of making money.

Yeah....like trying to convince people that those who live in inner cities have PTSD, just so they can get a disability check!! haha

originally posted by: snarky412
What a sad life these kids have got, with little to no future for some of them
Seems like more could be done to make their neighborhoods safer

End the war on drugs. I guarantee that gang culture will evaporate overnight once it stops being so easy to make money illegally.

But don't you think they'll just find some other way of making money illegally? Like sex trafficking, or illegal gambling, or some other type of
"mafia" behavior? Where there are not enough opportunities to make money legitimately, they will find some other way of making money.

Well first off, prostitution should be legal as well, FAR safer for everyone involved that way. Gambling same case. But even if they remain illegal,
while rackets such as those are available, making money in them isn't NEARLY as easy for the common criminal. Prostitution (or rather pimping)
requires the abuse of another person and mass gambling has to be conducted in a singular place that can be raided. You need to plan and organize
carefully to setup a successful criminal organization around those rackets and even if successful they won't generate anywhere CLOSE to the amount of
profit that drugs bring.

With buying and selling of drugs, you can be extremely discreet with it. The seller can keep the stash in his pocket, hand the item to the buyer like
he is giving him a handshake or something upon receiving the cash, then go on his way like he was never there. It is just WAY too easy to do this. No
one is exploited in this situation. The buyer is happy because he gets his fix so there doesn't need to be any intimidation not to go to the cops
unless the seller was seen by a third party, but that goes back to the discreetness issue. There is no evidence of the transaction left behind. No
forensics to be conducted to see that this deal went down.

I will concede that ending the war on drugs won't completely get rid of organized crime (ending prohibition didn't get rid of the mafia), but it will
SEVERELY cripple their ease of obtaining profits. This will allow the police to weed out the crappy organizations rather quickly so they can focus
their efforts on the big guys who are firmly entrenched in their respective territories and cities who will now be scrambling to maintain their profit
margin.

when people come home from serving in a war zone, they are often diagnosed with ptsd or some other stress disorder. so this is not an attempt to
label, it's just looking at the reality of poverty. poverty sucks, no one should have to live in poverty.

Its not an attempt to simply label
the kids. I dont doubt for one second that the label is accurate. Ive seen it first hand.

It is still a label, though. And it is a dangerous thing to apply labels to kids.

originally posted by: snarky412
What a sad life these kids have got, with little to no future for some of them
Seems like more could be done to make their neighborhoods safer

End the war on drugs. I guarantee that gang culture will evaporate overnight once it stops being so easy to make money illegally.

Our government evidently was the one that kinda helped it along, during the Regan/Bush years
They really have no desire to do anything about it even now, they just look the other way
Until it ends up on their front doorstep, nothing will be done about it

John Kerry was the pit-bull on the Contra-Investigation and would not stop until he had the answers

In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that
CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with coc aine from South
America... In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the
"moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose
responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies... Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress to
restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the Contra
supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff.

The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the
Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering
the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in
exchange for help in smuggling coc aine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about
the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

What if the coc aine was allowed to be trafficked by the government without regard or care for the impact it would have on a black community
fresh out of the throws of Jim Crow? What if while demonizing crack, the drug we were selling, the government was simultaneously complicit in
trafficking the coc aine the deadly drug was being made from? As a result of Kerry's investigation (along with the efforts of Rep. Maxine Waters)
there is no if -- it is proven, there is simply the question of why it happened and what the long lasting effects on cities and
families are across the nation.

Well, we now know what the long lasting effects of it is, don't we??????
How pathetic....and one wonders why most Americans don't trust their government....hmmmmm

i was alive during the 60s drug scene and the preachers in churches thought the influx and glamorizing of drug culture in the hippie movement was
right out of the marxist handbook on how to subvert a culture.

That does not mean total equality. I admit I am not equal to most people in strength. I am stronger than many, and weaker than many. I am not as smart
as many, and much smarter than many.

I am a manly man, there was a time in my life, that as a manly man, I let woman beat the # out of me, because as a manly man, that was what was
expected of me. To defend myself against a puny woman, even when she wielded a weapon, would make me less of a man.

Governments love poor neighborhoods being flooded by gangs. They want to destroy 90% of the population so that wall street, mega-corporations, and
butt-raping secret societies can get all the money and power. People don't choose where they grow up. It becomes difficult to worry about enrolling
in college if you don't even know if you'll make it alive through the month. Governments ALWAYS look the other way about the gang problem. But the
minute wall street's in trouble, there they go to the rescue flooding wall street people's pockets with hefty bonuses. Governments can use the fear
to justify whatever they want. Governments also love the war on drugs because they can use that money to fuel gangs and the violent destruction of
society. While there are safer analogue of the drugs that have lower toxicity. Every molecule that is a remodified, safer drug will get demonized just
because it's molecularly similar to pre-existing drugs. Meaning that any possible cures for anything can get criminalized to to a well engineered
technicality. www.bbc.co.uk...
Governments created the high rate of PTSD so that people who are otherwise bright would suffer from this PTSD stuff installed in neighborhoods and
schools. I myself am good and smart, but have developed PTSD recently.

The Above Top Secret Web site is a wholly owned social content community of The Above Network, LLC.

This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression.